Journalism is history's first draft , and Thomas Ricks explores in exacting detail the errors in planning, judgement, and strategy that lead to America's misadventure in Iraq. From the beginning, the war was hampered by poor analogies, cherry-picked intelligence, and an division at the highest levels of the Pentagon. There is more than enough blame to go around; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Franks, Powell, etc, but if any person is truly to blame, it's Rumsfeld, who sabotaged effective planning for the occupation, failed the military, and failed the American people. L Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, deserves another large helping of blame, but an effective plan would have never put him and the CPA's unending stream of short-term contractors in charge to begin with.

The most killing indictment of the Bush administration's plan for war is that there was a very real chance that the war could have been won in 2004 or 2005. Saddam was crushed, the insurgency weak, the Iraqi people desperate for real change. But because the Bush administration was focused on non-existent WMDs, and didn't provide a real strategy for reconstruction, they gave the insurgency time to organize and to fight. The bloody peak of the conflict in 2005-2007 is entirely due to failures in the opening days of the war. Military boldness is often to be commended, but with the Bush team, lead instead to a quagmire, and an expanded civil war which has cost millions of lives, incited hatred for Americans, and trained our enemies in the hard school of insurgency.

If there's any weakness to this book, it's that it was published in 2006, and so doesn't cover the surge and General Petraeus's successful counter-insurgency strategy. But you can't fairly blame a book for not being prescient. "The Gamble" is Ricks' sequel, and has been added to the pile.

This book is a tour de force investigation into the deeply complicated and corrupt nexus of science, medicine, and money. From barely paid professional human guinea pigs, to feted key opinion leaders, Carl Eliot exposes a medical system that is far from transparent and scientific. Medicine has become a business, driven from the top by pharmaceutical marketing agents on the search for the next blockbuster lifestyle drug. Science, supposed the ultimate arbiter of truth, has been coopted with ghostwritten articles, and company approved presentations. Ironically, precisely because doctors believe they are too intelligent and impartial to be swayed by mere marketing, they are vulnerable to the simplest ploys of free pens and a little gilded prestige.

The key observation of the book is not that this medical system is inherently bad; markets are very good at providing many goods. Rather, people approach medicine half as patients and half as consumers. The traditional role of the doctor is being supplanted by medical technicians and salesmen. To me, it appears that efforts to remove money from medicine are already doomed to failure. Rather than trying to restore a halcyon past, we should instead ask how the strengths of corporate medicine can be used to improve access, care, and outcomes.

The Jasons are the most powerful people you've never heard of. An elite advisory group composed of a veritable who's who of American physics, the Jasons have been providing cutting edge scientific expertise to the Department of Defense and other agencies for nearly fifty years.

Finkbeiner manages to depict both the personal charisma and fascination of the Jasons, and their murky ethical role. True genius is strange, and appealing, and a large part of why Jason persists is the pleasure that it's members take in working with each other; a pleasure echoed in Finkbeiner description of interviews with luminaries such as John Wheeler (many worlds interpretation, black holes) and Freeman Dyson (polymath of the 20th century).

However, at the same time that they break new intellectual ground for the sheer joy of it, Jason is an integral part of the defense establishment, and works to improve weapons. Smart bombs, combat sensors, and strategic missile defense can all be traced back to Jason, and this book does an excellent job putting a human face on a scientist's many obligations: to knowledge, to humanity, and to his or her country. Jasons see themselves as patriots, but have been labelled as war criminals. On balance, even as advance the science of death, the Jasons have injected sanity and reason into nuclear armaggedon. The science that makes the comprehensive test ban treaty possible was pioneered by Jason, while adaptive optics and oceanic tomography have advanced natural science.

For good or ill, Jason is a unique organization, and one that any scholar of science policy should be familiar with as an exemplar of what can be done at the very top of science.

"Marine platoon leader memoir" is one of my favorite micro-genres of literature, and among stories of leadership, heroism, maturation, and fear, The Coldest War stands a cut above for its clarity, candor, and writing. More Americans died in 3 years in Korea than in 10 years in Vietnam, and the war is still not officially over, yet most civilians are entirely ignorant of the conflict, let alone what it was like to serve in the coldest war.

Sent to Korea in November of 1952, Lt Brady faced a bloody, static war more remiscint of World War I than anything else. Americans and Chinese faced off across frozen mountains, where artillery made it too dangerous to move by daylight. In this war, men died by dribs and drabs, in raids, shellings, and accidents. There was no strategy, just a slow grinding of privates and platoon leaders against the communist adversaries.

Brady went onto to make a living as a novelist, and it shows in the precisely written descriptions of characters, terrain, and combat. A truly amazing story.

Ryczynski had simple assignment: write a history of the most important tool of the last millennium. But as with all simple assignments, it turned out to be far more complicated than expected. Most hand tools are ancient in origin, and power tools too specialized to count as ‘the most important tool’. But every household has a drawer full of screwdrivers, and nobody seems to know where they come from. “One Good Turn” is a quick and easy history. Not particularly deep, but fun and very readable.

Science is a human endeavor, with all the messiness that humanity entails. Cantor's Dilemma is fiction, but author Carl Djerassi is a noted scientist, and his depiction of research and the scientific community is dead accurate. More than a hundred science studies papers, this book put a human face on the complications of shared authorship, trust and betrayal between partners, battles of ego over prestige and priority, and why repeatability and personal integrity are absolutely central to good science.

One caveat, Cantor's Dilemma can get a little racy in sections, in ways that may help to accelerate the narrative, but which are ultimately distracting. This book is a product of a time and place (1989), were gender politics were a weighty issue in academia, and I want a second opinion on how the female characters have aged.

If you only know Iain Banks from his science-fiction, you owe it to check out his non-fiction. Garbadale is an intimate portrait of a very screwed up business-family, as seen through the eyes of one of it's junior members. The book tends to amble without purpose, but the natural appeal of Banks' characters and writing carries through any slackness in the plot. Away from the spaceships and galactic espionage, Banks shows that its those we're closest too who can hurt us the most.

Favela is a sociological triumph, the distillation of decades of experience in Favela of Rio De Janeiro, and an important book for anybody interested in urban living, State power, and the future of humanity. The majority of the population now lives in cities, and the fastest growing cities are the informal shanty-towns surrounding the old urban centers. This is where the bottom billion lives, outside the reach of government planning and oversight, and the ways in which survive will in large part shape the structure of society.

The body of the book is based on Dr Perlman's original work, a survey of life in the favelas in the late 1960s. By tracking down many of the original participants, and their children and grandchildren, she was able to accurately trace social mobility, success, and failure across generations. The results are surprising. Favelas are far from excluded from the fabric of the city, urban relocation programs have had some conditional successes, and legal title does not matter so much. Favela residents overwhelming believe in middle-class aspirations, and that their children will be better off than they are.

But more than the success of Favela residents, the real problems have been the growth of the drug traffic since the 1980s. Money, violence, and drugs harms everything in the city, from ordinary civilians caught in the crossfire, to teachers and nurses too afraid to travel to the favela, to local politicians bought and paid for by the drug lords. In Rio, the problem is exacerbated by militia of off-duty police and soldiers, who wage an indiscriminate war on drug dealers, funded through extortion.

The risk for the Favelas, and for similar informal cities, is that they slide from ungoverned zones to ungovernable zones. In a world awash in drugs, refugees, and sectarian hatred, it is far too easy for weakly administered zones to be taken over by criminals and terrorists. While Favelas never became wellsprings of Revolution, they provide a fertile breeding ground for bloody urban insurgencies.

When was the last time you thought about electricity, where it comes from, and who pays for it? Peter Fox-Penner takes on a lively and knowledgeable tour of our incredibly baroque electrical grid, from the vertically integrated major generators to deregulation of the 1990s. Essentially, the electrical system is based on an illusion of an effect market, carefully maintained with endless red tape. The "spot price" of electricity swings wildly from one day to the next, and even hour to hour as utilities balance demand from millions of appliances with generation from thousands of plants. Yet, even as the market price of electricity varies, consumers pay the same amount, whether it's for expensive power at 4:00 PM on a hot afternoon, or cheap power at 2:00 AM.

The Smart Grid, a combination of consumer meters that can pay for electricity at market rates, along with appliances that adjust consumption to match price, distributed generation, and high voltage lines, might save money, and the planet, but there are immense political and technological barriers in place. The power sector is entrenched, complex, and fully of traps for the unwary. Most of all, this book shows that immense resolve will be required to make a better future.

Many people go to war. Many people write books. Only a few people go to war and write books about it, and among those books, One Bullet Away is a masterpiece. Insightful, well-crafted, bring into focus the mind and soul of a modern warrior, and the endless screw-ups of war. This book is probably the best way to get a sense of the Marines, short of joining up.

Nathan Fick takes us from OCS in the peaceful days of 1998, through the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the process, he discuss the energy and discipline need to impose order on chaos of battle, lead men to victory, and bring them all home. At the same time, no matter how professional a leader is, they can't account for the stupidity of their superiors, the human limitations of their men, or the fatal lottery of combat.

The primary lesson every Marine Lieutenant learns is "If you fuck up, your men die." Too bad that somewhere between bars and stars, that lesson is lost.